"IBR" 2005 Obituary

IBRAHIM o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-06-14 published
RAYA,
ArchbishopJosephM. (1916-2005)
In hospital, 10 June, 2005 in Barry's Bay, Ontario. Former Greek
Catholic Metropolitan of Akko, Haifa, Nazareth and all Galilee
1968-1974. Key spokesman for justice for dispossessed Palestinians
and for the dignity of both Arabs and Jews in Israel. Nominee
for this year's Nobel Peace Prize. Born in Zahle, Lebanon, to
Michael and Almaz
RAYA. Survived by one brother, Frank (and Leila)
RAYA of Nevada, and nieces and nephews Michael and Margaret
RAYA,
Bob and Cheryl
RAYA,
RosemaryRAYA, George and Sylvia
BUSHALA,
all of California; Albert and Linda
RAYA of Texas; and Greta
RAYA DE
SESIN of Mexico. In lieu of flowers, donations may be
given to the poor through Madonna House, 2888 Dafoe Road, Combermere,
Ontario, K0J 1L0. Please indicate if for the works of Madonna
House or for the House of Grace in Israel.
Services will begin 17 June in Ottawa at Sts. Peter and Paul
MelkiteChurch, with Archbishop M. Ibrahim
IBRAHIM,
Eparch of
the Greek Catholics of Canada, leading a Wake Service Friday
evening and the Divine Liturgy Saturday morning. Services continue
at Madonna House in Combermere, beginning Saturday evening with
two evening Wake Services and a Byzantine Burial Service on Monday
at Noon. See www.madonnahouse.org for details.

IBRAHIM o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-07-21 published
Joseph RAYA,
Cleric,Scholar And Writer 1916-2005
Melkite Greek Catholic Archbishop sought peace in the Middle
East, marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and was beaten by the
Ku Klux Klan. He retired to a small Ontario village and, this
year, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special to The Globe and Mail, Thursday, July
21, 2005, Page S7
Toronto -- Archbishop Joseph
RAYA would have loved it. Yesterday,
July 20, would have marked the 65th anniversary of his becoming
a deacon in the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, one of the minority
Eastern rites of Catholicism, and the 64th anniversary of his
ordination as a priest. Today is also the 40th day -- a biblically
significant number -- following his peaceful death in the town
of Barry's Bay, Ontario at the age of 88.
To boot, yesterday was the feast day of St. Elias the Prophet.
In Israel, and
in Archbishop
RAYA's native Lebanon, the day is
commemorated with night-long fireworks displays because Elias
is believed to have ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot. So
last night, not far from the peaceful setting of Madonna House,
the Catholic lay community in Combermere, a village 200 kilometres
west of Ottawa to which Archbishop
RAYA retired in 1990, there
was a display of fireworks along the Madawaska River to celebrate
a life spent preaching peace and non-violence. Besides, the bishop
loved fireworks.
It seems there isn't much, or anyone, Archbishop
RAYA didn't
love. He is remembered for an easy smile and for loving unconditionally,
perhaps even inordinately. "He was a great, loving human being,"
recalls Lesya Sabada-Nahachewsky of the department of religious
studies and anthropology at the University of Saskatchewan, who
is writing a biography of Archbishop
RAYA. "He knew that one
of the hardest things to do -- probably the hardest -- is to
love and forgive the enemy."
He lived that Christian ethic, literally, during and after at
least two beatings administered by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
It was the early 1960s in Birmingham, Alabama, and Archbishop
RAYA was a parish priest in one of the most segregated cities
in the American south. He was a friend of Martin Luther King
Jr. and had linked arms with him and other black leaders in civil-rights
marches. He was also an outspoken critic of segregation, including
at his own church. As a result, Archbishop
RAYA received three
hooded visitors at his rectory one hot night. He was dragged
out of town and thrashed.
"While they were beating him, they called him a nigger lover,"
says Prof. Sabada-Nahachewsky. "And he responded, 'Yes, I am
a nigger lover, and I am a Ku Klux Klan lover too.' "
Just 14 months ago, the ailing cleric took a phone call at Madonna
House. "Is this Father Joe?" the creaking voice queried. It was
one of the Klansmen. He had tracked down his erstwhile victim
to rural Ontario to ask forgiveness. Since Archbishop
RAYA was
in the forgiveness business, it was granted.
Friends and followers recall a globetrotting priest best known
for seeking reconciliation between Christians, Muslims and Jews
in the Middle East, and for his translation of the Byzantine
liturgy from Arabic to English. For his life's work, he was nominated,
just prior to his death, for this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
Joseph RAYA was born in Zahle, in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, on
the Feast of the Assumption ("I was not yet born when my blood
started praying," he later wrote). Following primary studies
in Paris and ordination from the White Fathers' seminary in Jerusalem,
he taught in his native town and was later assigned to become
superintendent of schools in Cairo.
He immigrated to the U.S. in 1950 and, from 1952 to 1968, served
in Birmingham in the thick of the historic and often violent
battle for civil rights. "Few major decisions were made in the
civil rights struggle without his participation and blessing,"
wrote Karl Friedman, a member of Birmingham's Jewish community,
in documents supporting Archbishop
RAYA's candidacy for the Nobel
Prize.
Recognizing the need to modernize his church, he translated the
Byzantine missal from Arabic to English. A decade later, he produced
an English rendition of Byzantine Daily Worship, which won hearty
endorsement from his Orthodox counterparts and is still considered
the standard. His first connection to Madonna House, founded
in 1947 by Russian baroness Catherine de Hueck Doherty and now
a community of about 200 laypeople and priests who lead lives
of poverty, chastity and obedience, was in 1959, when he became
its first associate priest.
He served as a research aide during the historic Second Vatican
Council of 1962-1965, which sought to update the church.
Consecrated an archbishop in 1967 with the title of Metropolitan
of Akko, Haifa, Nazareth and All Galilee, he moved to northern
Israel and took up the Palestinians' cause in the sensitive period
following the 1967 Six-Day War. In August of 1972, he ordered
all his Galilean churches closed one Sunday and directed what
was until then the largest demonstration by a non-Jew in Israel
when he led 24,000 Muslims, Christians and Jews on a peaceful
march on the Knesset in Jerusalem to demand the return of residents
to two Arab villages that had been evacuated in the 1948 War
of Independence.
"He cultivated life while he inhabited deadly realities," commented
Prof. Sabada-Nahachewsky. "His peaceful, nonviolent approach
to conflicts really endeared him to people on both sides of often
bitter disputes." Indeed, Archbishop
RAYA became a popular figure
among Israeli peaceniks. But he also angered his own higher-ups
when he sold church lands to Arab farmers at bargain prices.
In 1974, he abruptly quit (though he kept the title and office).
Various accounts of his life and his own letter of resignation
provide cryptic reasons for the resignation, but the trigger
was straightforward.
"It was interference from higher authorities within the Vatican
and his own hierarchy," explains Prof. Sabada-Nahachewsky. He
felt, she added, that the Vatican favoured Roman Catholics and
ignored its Eastern siblings. "His problem with the Vatican was
that it was colonizing Eastern Christians there."
He then established a permanent residence at Madonna House, wrote,
and taught at various institutes of higher learning, including
St. Paul's University in Ottawa. The bucolic life lasted until
1985, when he was asked to return to war-torn Lebanon to teach
at a seminary and later, to head a diocese in the country's south,
where he helped plant thousands of trees and vineyards.
His return to Madonna House in 1990 was for good and he used
the time to write more than a dozen books on Byzantine liturgy,
culture and worship. "God is not an old bachelor in the sky,"
he would insist. "God is relationship!"
God also had a sense of humour, he reasoned, and so did he. Rev.
Ron CAFEO,
ArchbishopRAYA's aide-de-camp for the last 25 years,
recalls: "He used to carry a card saying that he wanted to donate
his body to science. Then, during one hospital trauma, we were
changing his gown and he saw himself in a full length mirror...
naked, and exclaimed, 'Oh, my God! Ron, tear up that card! Nobody
would want this body!' And that was the end of that."
Despite heart troubles, he continued attending overseas synods
of Melkite bishops, the last in 1998. "He was always pushing
his Melkite church to be more authentic to its roots," Father
CAFEO said.
Archbishop
RAYA's manifold spiritual skills were perhaps best
summed up in his eulogy by Bishop Ibrahim M.
IBRAHIM, head of
the Melkite Catholics in Canada: "He never stopped being a generator
of peace, an engine of hope, a fountain of generosity, an ocean
of honesty, a forest of pride, a fortress of charity, a planet
of knowledge, a Melkite dynamo and a garden of love. He was all
of that and much more, because he had Christ living within him
and because he reflected the bounty of the
son of Manitoba"
The bishop's own advice was plain enough, though it's worth wondering
how many of us could live it: "Give a little, it costs a lot.
Give a lot, it costs a little. Give everything, it costs nothing
at all."
Joseph Marie
RAYA was born in Zahle, Lebanon, on August 15, 1916.
He died of heart failure on June 10, 2005, in Barry's Bay, Ontario,
at the age of 88. He leaves one brother and several nieces and
nephews.

IBRAHIM o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-09-05 published
3 reservists charged in transient's death
Autopsy of homeless Toronto man reveals injuries consistent with
beating
By Jen GERSON,
Monday,September 5, 2005, Page A9
Toronto -- Paul
CROUTCH, a homeless man who Friends say was harmless
and avoided trouble, spent the last night of his life in a sleeping
bag in a downtown Toronto park, weathering the wet remnants of
hurricane Katrina.
The 59-year-old had spent the past three years sleeping on the
streets, or sometimes in shelters. Until recently, Mr.
CROUTCH
spent a lot of his time on a traffic island two blocks from where
he was killed. But, worried about drug dealers, he picked up
his meagre possessions and began sleeping in Moss Park, an area
frequented by transients and close to the Moss Park Armoury,
home to the Queen's Own Rifles of Canada regiment.
He told Friends he felt he would be safer there.
But in the pre-dawn hours last Wednesday, he was beaten to death,
allegedly by three part-time members of the Canadian Armed Forces
Reserves now charged with second-degree murder.
Shortly before 5 a.m., after receiving two 911 calls, police
arrived at Moss Park and found Mr.
CROUTCH unconscious in his
sleeping bag. He was taken to nearby St. Michael's Hospital,
where he died with his case workers from a local hostel at his
bedside, said Dion
OXFORD, of the Salvation Army's Gateway Shelter.
"He didn't cause trouble, he didn't cause fights, he was harmless,"
said Mr. OXFORD, who had known Mr.
CROUTCH since he started going
to the hostel in December of 2002.
Mr. CROUTCH usually slept outdoors but periodically stayed at
the shelter, Mr.
OXFORD said. The Armoury is often used as a
shelter for the homeless, for example during this summer's extreme
heat alerts.
Toronto homicide Detective Wayne
FOWLER said there was no sign
that Mr. CROUCH put up much of a fight when he was attacked.
An autopsy showed that his injuries were consistent with being
punched, kicked or stomped upon, police said.
Det. FOWLER credited people in the area with coming forward "with
any information they had," which led to the arrests on Friday.
Jeffery HALL, 21, Mountaz
IBRAHIM, 23, and Brian
DEGANIS, 21,
all of Toronto and all members of the Queen's Own Rifles, have
been charged with second-degree murder and assault causing bodily
harm. The three appeared in court on Saturday and are expected
to be back in court later this week.
Captain Mark
GILES, spokesman for the National Investigation
Service with the Canadian Armed Forces, said that each of the
three accused had at least two years experience with the forces,
and that all were trained for combat.
"This is a tragic situation, it's a very serious matter," he
said in a telephone interview from Ottawa yesterday.
Capt. GILES said that the case is now before the courts, and
so he could offer no further details about the accused. Toronto
police and the National Investigation Service were involved in
the investigation.
Army officials confirmed that a regimental social event took
place at Moss Park Armoury last Tuesday night, but could not
confirm whether the accused men attended the party.
Police said a woman who tried to intervene on behalf of Mr.
CROUTCH
suffered bruising. The woman lives in shelters and was prompted
by members of the community to contact police, Det.
FOWLER said.
"She sought her own medical treatment," he added. "She's sore,
but she's going to be okay."
Mr. CROUTCH spent every day at the Good Neighbours' Club, a day
centre for homeless senior men located in a nondescript white
building near the Moss Park Armoury.
Mr. OXFORD said Mr.
CROUTCH was in good physical health, adding
that he last saw him at a softball game in Moss Park last Monday.
Bob SEGUIN, a support-care worker with the Good Neighbours' Club,
said Mr. CROUTCH was essentially a good man but suffered from
paranoia and could sometimes be a bit of a handful.
He had been barred from most of the local shelters and so slept
outside most of the year, only sleeping indoors during severe
weather. Mr.
CROUTCH came by the club to shower, do his laundry
and sleep.
"He slept a lot here because he didn't sleep a lot at night,"
Mr. SEGUIN said.
Mr. SEGUIN said he believed Mr.
CROUTCH ran a newspaper in a
small town in British Columbia some years ago, but fell on hard
times and suffered mental problems.
"He kept to himself," Mr.
SEGUIN added. "He had a good sense
of humour, a witty, intellectual, dry type of humour."
The▼Gateway▼Shelter will hold a memorial service for Mr.
CROUTCH
next week.

IBRAHIM o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-09-07 published
Defeated by his demons, man met violent end on a Moss Park bench
By Anthony
REINHART,
Wednesday,September 7, 2005, Page A1
Last▼Tuesday night, Paul
CROUTCH laid down his life, or what
little was left of it, safe in the belief that he could handle
any threats.
He bedded down on his usual bench in Toronto's Moss Park, which,
to his mind, was a damn sight safer than the shelters, with their
drunken bullies and bedbugs, their tuberculosis, their thieves.
When the former British Columbia resident wound up dead the next
day, beaten almost beyond recognition on a rough and desperate
patch of the city's downtown, few would have expected police
to find $300 in his pocket, right there where he'd put it.
Fewer still would have guessed he had been a newspaper publisher,
minor hockey coach, homeowner and the father of a scientist before
his demons defeated him.
And no one who was thinking straight would have anticipated where
the finger would point: at three part-time reserve soldiers from
the armoury next door, three young men trained to lay down their
own lives to save others.
As often as death walks the tired streets around the park, "you
wouldn't expect people that are charged with our protection to
take this kind of action," said Don
HARRIS, who runs the Good
Neighbours' Club, a men's drop-in centre where Mr.
CROUTCH, 59,
visited daily.
For all its optimism, the centre's name suggested only irony
yesterday, given what police allege to have happened after three
members of the Queen's Own Rifles left the Moss Park Armoury
and visited the park next door.
There, police say, a woman saw three men beating a homeless man,
and they turned on her when she tried to intervene.
There,▲▼ at 4: 40 a.m., officers found an unconscious Mr.
CROUTCH,
suffering what the coroner would call "blunt impact head trauma...
consistent with being punched, kicked or stomped."
And there, they pursued leads, along with the National Investigation
Services of the Canadian Forces, that resulted in Jeffery
HALL,
21, Mountaz
IBRAHIM, 23, and Brian
DEGANIS, 21, being charged
with second-degree murder and assault causing bodily harm.
In due course, a court will answer the questions. Yesterday,
those closest to Mr.
CROUTCH could only wait, wonder and remember.
"Paul wasn't always a crazy homeless person," said Marilyn
HOWARD,
his former wife of 25 years, from Dawson Creek. "He was incredibly
brilliant, and that was probably a lot of his difficulty."
Difficulty quickly followed Mr.
CROUTCH's birth, in Toronto,
on November 6, 1945. He was placed in a foster home with a family
called CROUTCH, but they never adopted him.
At 12, he renamed himself Paul Richard Franklin
CROUTCH, taking
his first three names from his favourite hockey players.
When the young couple met in 1966, Mr.
CROUTCH worked for aircraft
maker McDonnell Douglas, and after they married, he started his
own fabricating business.
"His mental illness was starting even then," Ms.
HOWARD said.
"His big problem was, he was always right," and too often saw
the rest of the world as wrong.
The couple moved to Vancouver in 1973, then north to Dawson Creek
two years later, where Mr.
CROUTCH worked as a travelling auto-parts
salesman for Ford. Twice a month, even in winter, his work took
him deep into the Yukon via the Alaska Highway, a desolate but
essential lifeline for northerners.
"He did lots of favours for people on the highway," Ms.
HOWARD
said, recalling how her husband would pick up a half-dozen lobsters
on sale at Safeway, or a side of beef from a farmer, and deliver
them to far-flung Friends along his route.
Mr. CROUTCH left the road after their daughter, Shannon, was
born in 1977. He joined the Peace River Block News as advertising
manager, but when its owners cut salaries, he left. With his
wife and some Friends, he started a weekly, The Mirror, in 1980,
and focused his coverage exclusively on good news.
The▲▼ paper prospered, but Mr.
CROUTCH's mental illness became
ever more evident, both at home and in the paranoid tone of his
editorials.
"The worse it got, the less he realized how much help he needed,"
said Ms. HOWARD.
And he would go on refusing help until the day before his death.
The▲▼ couple divorced in 1993, and soon after, Mr.
CROUTCH sold
The Mirror and moved to Grande Prairie, Alberta.
"I got reports of him just sitting in the mall [in Grande Prairie],
looking like a zombie," Ms.
HOWARD said.
She lost track of him from there, but in the late 1990s, as his
daughter was earning her master's degree in plant science, Mr.
CROUTCH made his way back to Toronto.
When he walked through the stainless steel doors of the Good
Neighbours' Club in 1999, he filled out a form to become a member.
In the box marked "next of kin," he wrote "none wished."
From then on, he was a fixture, albeit a quiet one, at the drop-in
centre, where he showered, did his laundry and sent faxes to
the social agencies that helped him.
"He was really smart, and he really felt he'd been wronged,"
said Gary McCRIMMON, a worker at the centre, referring to Mr.
CROUTCH's phantom fears of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
the government, whoever. "I think it consumed him and it was
a large part of his downfall."
As evening fell last Tuesday, Mr.
CROUTCH turned aside a doctor's
concerns with his usual phrase: "I'll be dead in a couple days."
He also refused, as usual, to sleep in a homeless shelter.
"I gave him two bottles of water and he set off for the park,"
Mr. McCRIMMON said.
When a detective called the centre on Wednesday morning, Mr.
McCRIMMON answered. When told of Mr.
CROUTCH's death, and of
the bruising on his face, his first thought was that he had fallen.
"She said, 'Oh, no, no, this is a homicide,' " he said. "When
I went and identified the body, I could see what she meant."
Ms. HOWARD, who spent yesterday taking condolences on the sidewalks
of Dawson Creek and arranging a Toronto cremation by phone, said
she hopes to be in court to see her ex-husband's alleged killers
face justice.
"Paul's life was over, in many ways, years ago," she said. "These
people who did this have got to atone for what they've done."

IBRAHIM o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-09-04 published
3 reservists face murder charges
Homeless man beaten to death in Moss Park
By Hilda HOY,
StaffReporter
Three members of the Canadian Armed Forces Reserves are facing
second-degree murder and assault charges after a homeless man
was beaten to death in a downtown park and a woman coming to
his aid was attacked.
Paul Richard
CROUTCH, 59, died at St. Michael's Hospital on Wednesday
as his case manager stood nearby. An autopsy performed Friday
found the cause of death was trauma to the head, and the injuries
were consistent with being punched, kicked or stomped.
Police were called to an assault in Moss Park, near Sherbourne
and Shuter Sts., shortly before 5 a.m. on Wednesday. An unconscious
CROUTCH was rushed to hospital but died later that morning.
A woman who witnessed the beating and intervened was treated
for soft-tissue damage and bruising, police said.
CROUTCH had been a resident of the Salvation Army's Gateway Shelter,
around the corner from the park on Jarvis Street, since 2002. Gateway
will host a funeral next week.
He has family on the West Coast who have been notified.
"He was very mild-mannered and soft-spoken," said Gateway director
Dion OXFORD. "He was harmless."
Last▲ time he saw
CROUTCH, he was watching the Gateway softball
team play in the park.
"He kept to himself most of the time," remembered Gateway chaplain
Ron FARR.
Brian DEGANIS, 21, Jeffery
HALL, 21, and Mountaz
IBRAHIM, 23,
all of Toronto, were arrested and charged Friday after a joint
investigation by Toronto police and the army's National Investigation
Services.
The three men are part-time members of the Queen's Own Rifles
of Canada, a reserve infantry unit that trains at the Moss Park
Armoury adjacent to the park where
CROUTCH was found.
Each has received at least two years of combat training, although
the exact length of their service could not be confirmed. They
had attended a "social function" at the armoury that evening
but were not in uniform, investigation services spokesman Capt.
Mark GILES said.
"Uniform or no uniform, these are very serious charges and we
take it very seriously," said
GILES.
Because the incident took place in the park and not on armoury
property, the investigation falls under city police jurisdiction.
The National Investigation Services provided support and will
continue to do so as needed,
GILES said.

IBRAHIM o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-09-14 published
Homeless man's defiant life honoured
BARTLEMAN met slaying victim
CROUTCH spoke of his mental illness
By John GODDARD,
StaffReporter
Paul CROUTCH attracted more attention at his funeral yesterday
than he likely ever did in life, as the victim of a fatal beating
that has galvanized the downtown homeless community and moved
the Queen's representative in Ontario to sympathy.
LieutenantGovernorJamesBARTLEMAN and his small entourage mixed
with social workers, street people, a few of
CROUTCH's former
Friends and his ex-wife at a shelter on lower Jarvis St. to pay
tribute to
CROUTCH as a man, not a statistic.
"I met him two years ago, at about 6 a.m.,"
BARTLEMAN told about
130 mourners at the yellow-brick chapel of the Salvation Army
Gateway▲ shelter, where
CROUTCH sometimes stayed. "I was part
of a Salvation Army breakfast run and I had on a Salvation Army
jacket."
BARTLEMAN recalled getting out of a van and serving coffee and
soup to a man sitting on a park bench.
The man, not aware he was speaking to the lieutenant governor,
told of owning a newspaper in British Columbia and falling on
hard times due to mental illness.
BARTLEMAN recognized the same
details in newspaper accounts of the beating.
"He was well spoken, obviously well read and very likeable,"
the lieutenant governor recalled.
CROUTCH, 59, could also be anti-social, paranoid, fatalistic
and self-neglectful, Friends and other supporters said of his
decline. And in the early hours of August 31, he was beaten to
death in his sleeping bag next to the Moss Park Armoury at Queen
and Jarvis Sts.
Three reserve soldiers with the Queen's Own Rifles, attached
to the armoury, are charged with second-degree murder in the
case. They are Brian
DEGANIS, 22, Jeffrey
HALL, 21, and Mountaz
IBRAHIM, 23.
All three had been celebrating with other reservists the night
before, after 10 days of war games at Canadian Forces Base Petawawa,
northwest of Ottawa.
The anti-poverty group Toronto Disaster Relief Committee has
called on Ontario's attorney general to prosecute the killing
as a hate crime, saying
CROUTCH was targeted as a homeless person.
The▲ group also helped pay for
CROUTCH's ex-wife, Marilyn
HOWARD,
to travel from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to attend the
funeral, and is arranging for her to meet senior Crown attorney
Fred BRALEY this week to discuss the hate crime proposal.
At the crowded chapel yesterday,
HOWARD spoke of
CROUTCH as a
spirited family man and entrepreneurial talent. The two met in
Toronto in 1966, she said, and later moved to Vancouver and the
northern British Columbia town of Dawson Creek.
In 1977, their daughter was born. She did not attend the service,
but a recent photograph showing her as a smiling blonde stood
on the altar next to a container holding
CROUTCH's ashes, and
two snapshots of
CROUTCH playing with her as a baby.
CROUTCH stopped seeing his daughter when she was 14 as his creeping
mental illness turned serious. The couple divorced in 1993. Their
daughter recently graduated with an M.A. in plant sciences in
the United States,
HOWARD said.
"(Over the years), he owned six houses, including a section of
farmland, and was a partner in seven businesses,"
HOWARD said.
At one point, he started his own weekly newspaper in Dawson Creek,
the Mirror, which is still publishing. Earlier on, he worked
as a travelling auto-parts salesperson for Ford.
"Every second week, he would drive 700 miles of the Alaska Highway,"
HOWARD said. "He was extremely well known. He'd get calls from
all over the North -- 'Hey, I hear Safeway has a sale on lobsters,
can you bring some with you?' He would do those things for people."

IBRAHIM o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-09-27 published
DEMLAKIAN,
Justine (née
IBRAHIM) (1908-2005)
Passed away peacefully at her home with her family at her side
on Sunday, September 25, 2005; devoted wife of the late Shafik
DEMLAKIAN, loving mother of Nairi, wife of the late Abraham
SOUVALIAN
and of Tom with his partner Victor
SO; doting grandmother of
Paul and Mark
SOUVALIAN;
Haig and Aram
CHURUKIAN, Nairy EL-
KEILANI
and their families in Cairo; Simé, Zaven, Vazken, and the late
Peter DEMLAKIAN and their families in Sydney, Australia; Rita
APKARIAN and her family in Seattle; Vahan
DEMLAKIAN and his family
in L.A.; sister of the late Dr. Gilbert
IBRAHIM of Cairo and
the late Victor
IBRAHIM, her nieces Justine
PIPER and Salma
RANDALL
and their families in Reading, England; and numerous family members
and Friends in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, England, the U.S., Australia,
Montreal and Toronto. Born August 3rd, 1908 in Mosul, the Ottoman
Empire, to the Reverend Thomas
IBRAHIM and Salma
SPEAR,
Justine
spent her youth in Mardin, Turkey and her late teens in Egypt,
graduating from the American University at Cairo in the 1930's
with a B.A. in Education and became a teacher in the English
MissionCollege,Heliopolis. Justine married Shafik
DEMLAKIAN
of Mousa Dagh in 1941 and devoted her talents to the Armenian
Red Cross and the Housaper Club in Cairo. In 1974 she joined
Tom and Nairi with her family in Toronto and made Canada her
home. With her poise, patient determination and nurturing nature
she taught her children and grandchildren discipline, perseverance
and true values. She will live forever in our hearts. The family
extends its special gratitude to the Community Care Access Centre
staff, the Mt. Sinai Palliative Care Program, the North York
General Hospital and her family physician, Dr. David
TANNENBAUM
of Mt. Sinai Hospital for many years of compassionate care. The
family will receive Friends at the Humphrey Funeral Home - A.W.
Miles Chapel, 1403 Bayview Avenue, from 12: 00 noon-1:00 p.m.
on Wednesday, September 28th. Funeral service in the Chapel at
1: 00 p.m. Interment at Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
How 2 letter Surnames like SO work in OGSPI